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Comment by tannhaeuser | Hacker News Reader

Similarly OT, a pet peeve of mine is how Germans and others consistently pronounce (the eg. SQL datatype) VARCHAR as var-CHAIR or sometimes var-CZAR (war czar, warczaw) when they pronounce CHAR/CHR correctly.

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Out of interest, what do you consider to be the correct pronunciation of CHAR? There seems to be considerable variation in how people pronounce it (see e.g. [1,2]). Personally I have always used the '/tʃɑr/' one, and similar for VARCHAR.

[1] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/60154/how-to-pro... [2] http://www.stroustrup.com/bs_faq2.html#char

As in "character" for which CHAR and VARCHAR are abbreviations?

Disclaimer: not an English native speaker

That's because the English language is a mess with respect as to how something is pronounced.

Great point! The words... their, mare, hair, where... all rhyme in English. This drives Spanish speakers crazy.

Or because it behaves just like a pidgin..

We're going with VAR-care and care as correct pronunciations of both, right? Asked as a native US English speaker.

I've never heard it pronounced that way, although 'care' is how the first syllable in the word 'character' is pronounced.

I've always heard it pronounced var char (the parts rhyme). Char is pronounced like when you burn/blacken a steak. "Char-grilled food is cooked over or under direct heat so that its surface becomes slightly black"

Logic dictates it should be pronounced as char-acter, but my brain brings out char-coal always.

I'm Dutch, so I pronounce it with a hard ch as in loch, even when speaking English.

If I'm understanding you correctly, then most English speakers would call that correct. It's short for "character" so is pronounced as the first syllable of that (with a hard 'ch') not like the word "char" is pronounced. I think I personally would swap between the two fairly randomly, probably due to learning to code from text-based sources and not hearing it pronounced till much later.

To be clear: I do not mean the /k/ sound, but the /x/ or /χ/ (voiceless velar/uvular fricative), which is seldom used in English, except when properly pronouncing the names of Scottish lochs, or the name of J.S. Bach. Maybe it's not even used at all in English, but only in Scottish, but we're getting off-topic already.

If I were consciously trying to pronounce "char" as an English speaker would, I would probably say /tʃɑr/.

Interesting; I pronounce "loch" as "lock" and Merriam-Webster seems to agree. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/loch I guess you're referring to the UK pronounciation listed here instead? http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/pronunciation/english/loc...

I thought the use of the specific word "loch" would have been clear enough, but apparently the pronunciation of that word I thought I'd heard a lot on the BBC is not known as widely as I thought. Maybe I'm misremembering. None of the pronunciations you linked to is what I intended. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_velar_fricative or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_uvular_fricative , as well as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_English#Phonology .

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